*BSD News Article 26889


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From: nate@bsd.coe.montana.edu (Nate Williams)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.development
Subject: Re: fdisk
Date: 3 Feb 1994 08:07:51 GMT
Organization: Montana State University - Bozeman MT
Lines: 30
Message-ID: <2iqbcn$k0k@pdq.coe.montana.edu>
References: <0hI0M_u00WB7EC5GkR@andrew.cmu.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: bsd.coe.montana.edu

In article <0hI0M_u00WB7EC5GkR@andrew.cmu.edu>,
Timothy J Kniveton  <tim+@CMU.EDU> wrote:
>are there any plans for FreeBSD to support a linux-style fdisk, which
>*correctly* recognizes the disks' geometry?

For *most* folks, FreeBSD *correctl* recognizes the disks' geometery.

As has been pointed out by others, FreeBSD gives you the exact geometery
of your disk which can be a bonus for file-system tweaking, but for existing
with MS-DOS this can be bad.

The fix for this is to use a DOS based fdisk program so that the
partition will be correctly setup for DOS and FreeBSD.  In the
tools/dos_tools directory of the release on FreeBSD.cdrom.com is the
pfdisk utility which works quite nicely.  (I used it on every machine
that had DOS and FreeBSD installed w/out problems).  The only thing you
have to remember is that the FreeBSD partition ID is 165 since it's not
(yet?) in pfdisk.

Using DOS tools ensures that FreeBSD and DOS will co-exist.  (Since
by it's very nature FreeBSD wants to swallow DOS whole. :-)


Nate

-- 
nate@bsd.coe.montana.edu     |  FreeBSD core member and all around tech
nate@cs.montana.edu          |  weenie.
work #: (406) 994-4836       |  Graduating May '94 with a BS in EE 
home #: (406) 586-0579       |  - looking for work in CS/EE field.